1. The potential for idolatry. No, I’m not saying that every church or pastor that uses a big screen or Power Point slides during their service is necessarily guilty of idolatry.  But when the people of a church finds themselves thinking things like “we can’t reach this generation without this kind of technology”, or when a pastor finds himself freaking out when the Power Point presentation crashes two minutes before the service starts, they might be.  I have heard people actually say that the glitches in their church’s Power Point presentation were caused by the devil.  Really?  I think Satan is more interested in making us think that the Power Point presentation is necessary in some way, and that people will either not believe in Christ without it or that the church will die without it.

God does not need a big screen or a Power Point presentation.  His Holy Spirit is the one who creates faith in our hearts through the preaching of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments.  There will not be one more person in heaven because a pastor decided to supplement his sermon with Power Point slides or because a church decided to put the lyrics of all their songs on a big screen.  Conversely, there will not be one more person in hell because a pastor or church decided NOT to do these things.  When we think that our human activity apart from the Word of God makes the difference between heaven and hell, we are no longer trusting in God alone to save sinners.  We are guilty of idolatry and need to repent.

2. Making the screen the focal point of the service. Instead of the focal point of the service being the pulpit and the altar and the baptismal font – the places where the Word is proclaimed and the gifts of God are distributed – the focal point is the big screen at the front of the sanctuary.  Instead of drawing people’s attention to the place where God comes down to us, the screen draws people’s attention to the things WE are doing.  If there is a way to NOT make the screen the focal point, I would be very interested to hear how that could be done.

3. Detaching lyrics from the actual musical notes to which those lyrics are sung. I have learned the tune of many a Lutheran hymn simply because the words AND musical notes were available to me in the hymnal.  Musical notes are generally not projected on a screen, for copyright reasons – and thus the only songs that are projected onto the screen are usually 1) very simple praise songs with little depth and/or 2) songs with tunes that everyone knows already.  Since big screens are purported to be an “outreach” tool, how does it help outsiders to the church if everyone expects them to already know the tunes of all the songs that are being sung?  Had it not been for the hymnal and its inclusion of the musical notes I would have been hopelessly lost when I first started attending a Lutheran church – where the majority of the hymns were hymns I did not know.

“But what about the fact that most people don’t know how to read music to begin with?”  That’s more of a commentary on the current state of education in this country.  Drawing the conclusion that “thus we should completely abandon written music in church” does not follow.  The fact that many (maybe even most?) people nowadays are NOT able to read music is no excuse for making it more difficult for the rest of us who are.  I have found that my ability to read the music of a tune unfamiliar to the people around me makes it easier for them to catch on to the melody.  Take the hymnal away and I might be just as lost as anyone else.  Without the written music it makes it much harder for people to learn new or unfamiliar songs that have any theological depth.

So those are a few of the reasons why I am not a big fan of screens in church.  You may disagree with me, and that’s fine.  Or you may feel the same way as I do but for other reasons.  Feel free to post your comments.  And read this article by Pastor Fisk.  Great stuff.

Noll states early on:

The book’s main narrative describes a shift away from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America.  It is not an exaggeration to claim that this nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged (p.3).

So why was this the case?  How did Christian theology develop in the early United States of America, and why did it develop in the specific way that it did?  Noll answers that question by postulating a particularly American synthesis of “evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning” (p. 9).

1. Evangelical Protestant religion.  The religious landscape of the early United States came to be dominated by Protestant evangelicals who “shared an emphasis on conversion, the supreme religious authority of the Bible, and an active life of personal holiness” (p. 11)  These Protestants were also highly influenced by the revivalism that swept through the colonies in the 18th century.

2. Republican political ideology.  An almost unique feature of American thought is the idea that Christianity and a republican form of government are compatible.  To this day in America, one is assumed to fit with the other, hand in glove. But this has not at all been the case outside the United States – in fact, in the eighteenth century “almost all observers outside the United States assumed that republican thinking contradicted the principles of traditional religion” (p. 54).

3. Commonsense moral reasoning.  American Christians in the late 18th to the early 19th century had come to rely on “common sense” to determine truth in matters of theology and ethics.  “In the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, almost all Americans, especially Christian ministers who ventured into print, relied strategically on the weight of ‘self-evident truths’ or ‘intuitive truths,’ even as they expressed repeatedly the conviction that ‘the best reason which anyone can have for believing any proposition is that it is so evident to his intellectual faculty that he cannot disbelieve it’” (p. 95).  This was a departure from traditional Protestant ways of thinking that were much more suspicious of autonomous human reason.

Noll discusses the various historical and religious factors that led to this unique American synthesis, not the least of which is the fact that Puritan revivalism had the unintended effect of undermining the traditional link between church and society and paved the way for republican ideas to fill the vacuum.  He goes on to describe in great detail how the American synthesis shaped Calvinism and Methodism (two dominant religious traditions) in America.  The story of the Americanization of Calvinism (which was really the Americanization of Puritanism) was especially intriguing.  It shed a great deal of light on a puzzling question that I had been pondering for some time: how did Presbyterianism produce a Pelagian like Charles Finney?  The answer in a nutshell is that American “commonsense reasoning” led Calvinism in America down a slippery slope that eventually led to a practical Arminianism and ended in the denial of original sin altogether.  In the same way “commonsense reasoning” seemed to have led Methodism from its original emphasis on “prevenient grace” to a more fully Pelagian view.

Another fascinating aspect of the book was Noll’s treatment of how the American synthesis dealt with the issues underlying the Civil War.  The dominant hermeneutical grid used by Americans of the antebellum era to interpret the Bible was what Noll describes as a “Reformed, literal hermeneutic.”  Noll describes the Reformed nature of this hermeneutic (as opposed to hermeneutical principles employed by Lutherans and high Anglicans) as follows:

First, Calvinists appropriated the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura by perceiving the Bible as an authority set over against other religious authorities.  Second, Calvinists often practiced some version of the “Regulative Principle,” a position the English Puritans had developed from general Reformed leanings.  It held that believers were required to do what the Bible commands but were equally required not to do those things about which the Bible is silent.  Last was the so-called third use of the law, or the belief that, after its twofold use for restraining sin in society and for showing individuals their need of salvation, the moral teaching of Scriptures existed also (even primarily) to provide a blueprint for how Christians, in grateful obedience to God, should live their entire lives (p. 377).

He then describes the “literal” nature of the hermeneutic, which went beyond the Reformed Regulative Principle and could be better traced to American historical circumstances, particularly those that encouraged anti-traditionalism.  It was also very much tied to the idea of commonsense moral reasoning:

The assumption that people could see clearly and without ambiguity what the Bible said, and that this biblicistic knowledge qualified one to judge connections between moral cause and moral effect, was the common person’s counterpart to the Enlightenment confidence displayed by intellectual elites who employed learned formal moral philosophy to the same ends.  Democratic biblicism undercut trust in traditional interpretations of Scripture with the same force that they were being leveled by a reliance on philosophical common sense.  In both cases, confidence in present abilities overmastered confidence in what was handed on from the past.  In both cases, a liberated modern self was the starting point for biblical interpretation (p. 381).

Noll goes on to describe how the Civil War shattered the near-universality of this hermeneutic in America and presented an insurmountable challenge to the American synthesis itself, since pro-slavery arguments drew directly on the “Reformed, literal hermeneutic” and one had to step outside this interpretive framework in order to argue against slavery.   Yet to step outside this framework was unthinkable for many.  Evangelical Protestants saw the Reformed/literal approach to Scripture as having been validated by its success in evangelizing the nation and achieving widespread social transformation, and it was inextricably linked to republican ideals.  But the same interpretive principles that led to Christian republicanism and fueled revivalism also led to arguments for the enslavement of a particular ethnic group in America.

I found this book to be very enlightening as to the historical reasons why Americans think in the ways that they do about politics and religion, even into the 21st century.  The American synthesis and the Reformed, literal interpretation of Scripture no longer dominated American thought after the Civil War, but in conservative Protestant circles they certainly seem to have persisted, sometimes very strongly.  American evangelicals by and large do not see how much their theology has been influenced by the unique twists and turns of American history.  When I was growing up, a mostly-Arminian sort of revivalism was all I knew.  To me that was Christianity, and there were no other categories: there were Catholics, there were liberals (which included most Protestant denominations except conservative Baptists) and then there were Christians.  My church was a “Bible church” because we just believed the Bible, not like all those denominations out there that held to creeds and confessions.  Patriotic holidays would be celebrated in church and no one would blink an eye.  There seemed to be no question in anyone’s mind that the founding fathers had intended America to be a Christian nation and that America was in some sense special in God’s eyes.  The end of America meant the end of the world, literally.

As I eventually learned, things were not so simple.  But things make a lot more sense now.  My eyes were opened to a Christianity far more ancient than American revivalism long before I read America’s God.  But this book helped me to better understand the origins of the Christianity that was made in America, and to better understand how the current American theological landscape came to be.  If you have the patience, it is well worth the read.

…the religious history of the late-colonial period, particularly the Great Awakening and its effects….is a story of unintended consequences.  Leaders of the Awakening – from Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, Joseph Bellamy in rural Connecticut, Gilbert Tennent in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Samuel Davies in Virginia, to George Whitefield, who went everywhere – knew what they were after when they enlisted affective rhetoric to preach about intractable human depravity and supernal divine grace.  They were trying to reawaken the church for the sake of the church itself, to reassert the sovereignty of God’s divine love in conversion, to exalt the substitutionary, penal work of Christ as God’s way of reconciliation with sinners, to demonstrate the necessity of conversion as a prerequisite for truly virtuous living, and by these means to check the worldliness promoted by the era’s new forms of commerce and entertainment.  Yet the pursuit of such goals had ironic consequences.  The awakeners preached a higher, more spiritual vision of the church, yet the result was decline in the very notion of church and a transfer of religious commitment from the church to the nation.  They focused on God’s role in conversion yet brought about an exaltation of human activity in the process of salvation.  They preached a traditional doctrine of the atonement yet opened the way toward redefining the work of Christ as an outworking of governmental relationships rather than the assuagement of God’s wrath.  They rooted true virtue in supernatural conversion yet created conditions for a new concept of virtuous living as in principle available to every person by nature alone.

From Mark A. Noll, America’s God, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 13-14.

What’s in the Bible? is, in a nutshell, an attempt to address declining biblical literacy in the North American church. VeggieTales was an amazingly effective way to teach individual Bible stories, but not abstract concepts like sin, redemption, or God’s grace. Yet these concepts are the core of a meaningful faith. Christian colleges report that incoming freshmen—even those from Christian homes—know less about the Bible each year. And partly as a result of a lack of meaningful knowledge about their faith, 65 percent of Christian kids are walking away from the church as soon as they leave high school.

So, What’s in the Bible? is a new 13-part series that will walk kids all the way through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Call it “Christianity 101”—a crash course in our faith, presented with the same wit and whimsy as VeggieTales.

A number of introductory videos can be found here:  http://whatsinthebible.com/

I was curious as to what you all think of this sort of thing.

My first inclination is to think that, despite their good intentions in trying to address widespread Biblical illiteracy, this sort of thing actually contributes to that by trivializing the Bible and putting it on par with the latest whimsical animated Disney movie. It seems to me to be the product of a philosophy that says kids can’t learn unless they are being entertained/amused. The problem is – how does this prepare kids for serious instruction when they are older? How does one transition to something as ordinary as the Small Catechism, or serious topics like apologetics, after a steady diet of stuff like this? I’m having a hard time imagining kids taking the subjects of sin, redemption, suffering, death, and hell too seriously with this kind of presentation.

Maybe my fears are unfounded? Any thoughts?

There is a common assumption today that the liturgy must reflect the language and the ethos of the current culture.  If this is true, then liturgies will veer toward the pop culture in which we live.  These culturally devised liturgies are at times exciting and entertaining, but are not transcultural.  At most, they will give only immediate satisfaction.  These liturgies then become just another expression of the culture's malaise, a feel-good, shallow, artificially uplifting sentimentality.

Furthermore, focusing on the centrality of the worshiper's experience in contemporary liturgies runs contrary to our Lutheran understanding of the hiddenness of the Kingdom in the world in which we live.  The Church's liturgy is a humble expression and demonstration of the nature of the Kingdom.  No matter how difficult our hymns, how untrained our organist, how weak our singing, God is present in our liturgy, offering His gifts of salvation.  We dare not be seduced into thinking that the Kingdom comes by our own relevant production and performance.  We must always maintain that the Kingdom is hidden under the humble means of God's proclamation of the new era of salvation in Jesus Christ through simple words, simple water, simple bread, and wine.  This is why our liturgies are sacramental and why they give what we need the most: the forgiving mercy of God in Christ through which we are cleansed and made worthy to stand in His presence and receive His gifts.  Believing that God is sacramentally present in our ancient but enduring liturgy is at the center of our understanding of God's revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ and His salvation of the world through suffering and sacrifice.  The liturgical structures of Word and Sacrament transcend all cultures and create our Lutheran theology of worship.

Lutheran worship is its own culture, distinct from both the pop culture of secular society and the worship that characterizes most evangelical denominations in our country today.  The Lutheran Church must develop and maintain its own cultural language that reflects the values and structures of Scripture, not of the current culture.  And this language can be shaped only by a biblical theology that affirms Christ's work of making right what has gone wrong in declaring us righteous and offering this righteousness to us through His bodily presence in our worship in Word and Sacrament.  Our belief that Jesus Christ is present in worship binds our Church together as a community, confessing one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all.  This community is the Body of Christ, the Church.  One day, the liturgical problems will no longer exist for the Church, for we will worship the Lamb in His kingdom that has no end.  For now, however, we must constantly remember that we have now the one God who is sacramentally present among us as Savior and who continually invites us to the ongoing feast.

From Heaven on Earth: The Gifts of Christ in the Divine Service by Arthur A. Just Jr.  Concordia Publishing House: 2008, pp. 28-29.

This sort of thing seems to be very foreign to many in the church today.

There is no other word for this but idolatry.

Richard Gamble at the American Conservative writes a scathing review here (HT: imonk on Twitter).  I think he is spot on.

There was some discussion of this phenomenon in the comments on my previous blog post, "Authority in America."  This new Bible promotes the myth of America as a "Christian nation".  Here's a quote from Gamble's article summarizing this popular view:

The story … is straightforward and
reinforces the familiar Christian-America framework. This whole project
would collapse without that framework. America was founded on a
“Judeo-Christian ethic” drawn from the Bible. Until relatively
recently, principles taken from that ethic dominated America’s schools,
politics, and culture. Under assault by secularists who have obscured
the role of religion in American history and misappropriated the myth
of separation of church and state, the nation has declined morally. The
Bible must therefore be returned to its central place of authority in
American life in order to restore the nation’s moral fabric and reclaim
its special calling from God to defend freedom at home and abroad. The
phrase “one nation under God” best sums up what America once was and
what it will be again if enough concerned Christians rally to the call
for political action.

This is the story that I grew up with as an American evangelical, and which I didn't really question much until relatively recently when confronted with the facts about the matter.  The church I used to attend (before I became a Lutheran) very much held to the "Christian America" framework as summarized above.  American holidays were celebrated in church, where patriotic hymns would be sung and the choir would sing patriotic medleys applying 2 Chronicles 7:14 to America.  The Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S.A. would sometimes be recited during these times. I remember a few Thanksgiving Eve Communion services where the Founding Fathers were probably quoted more than Scripture. 

The story was that America was founded by Christians as a Christian
nation, and if only America would repent and return to that Christian golden age, everything would be wonderful.  Never mind that many of the Founding Fathers were Deists who rejected miracles, the deity of Christ and the authority of Scripture.  Never mind things like slavery, manifest destiny, and myriad other manifestations of the fact that America was hardly an example of moral purity before prayer and Bible reading were taken out of American public schools in the 1960's.  And never mind the fact that simply being a nation of relatively moral people does not equal being a Christian nation. 

The fact is, Americans tend to mix church and state in ways that people in other countries never dream of (and are often shocked by).  We have Americanism in church services, and a religious component to our patriotism. 

What would happen if America fell, like the Roman empire fell?  Many American Christians have no category for this whatsoever.  The only thing they can say is that with the end of America comes the end of the world.  Neither do they have any category for potential persecution or government hostility toward Christians.  That's for people in other countries, but not for Americans.  He'll Rapture us out of here before anything bad happens to us.  This is the attitude that is out there.

Would all these people who look at America as God's chosen nation still trust in God after such a scenario?  Or would they find that they had been engaging in idolatry – worshiping a god of their own imagination, of their own imaginary and idealized history?  I fear that the American Patriot's Bible can only fuel such idolatry. 

Read Richard Gamble's article here.

There's been a big discussion at the WT regarding female pastors and orthodox theology that I've been reading with interest.  In the course of that discussion one of the posters, Didymus20X6, said something that really struck me regarding how we view authority in America:

At the root of much of this contention is how we view authority. Scripture actually seems to place a great deal of esteem in authority. "Honor your father and your mother", the commandment teaches us. What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not despise those in authority over us, but love, cherish, honor, serve, and obey them. This teaching is further elaborated on in Romans 13 and elsewhere in the New Testament. Scripture: authority is good; rebellion is not.

So where does this faulty idea that authority is bad come from? From narcissistic, self-serving, highly individualistic American culture. We are the country that threw off the shackles of oppression from the British king (e.i., we killed a bunch of people BECAUSE WE DIDN'T LIKE PAYING TAXES). We fought a Civil War for the sake of freedom, but how contradictory is it to defend the freedom to oppress other human beings? Point is, in America, we worship the Unholy Trinity: Me, Myself, and I. Here in America, we sing the Frank Sinatra Hymn: "♫ I did it MYYYYYYYY WAAAAAY! ♪" Here in America, authority is always bad, no matter whether God establishes it, no matter whether it is for our benefit. In our culture, authority is bad, and rebellion is good. "Woe unto you who call evil good, and good evil," says the LORD.

This, I think, is why no one likes to talk about authority, or even submission to authority.

So, in a culture built on rebellion and defiance, which exalts the will of the individual over the good of society, is it any surprise that submission and authority are such nasty words in our language?"

"A culture built on rebellion and defiance." This makes me wonder whether or not we are now reaping what our forefathers have sown.  We Americans romanticize rebellion, particularly when it comes to the origins of our country. Romans 13 applies to everything else but when it comes to the Revolutionary War, God must have been for it because look at the good results!  But I've never read anything in Scripture that tells us that the end justifies the means.  There's really no way to know what the outcome would have been if our forefathers had taken Romans 13 more seriously.

We lament the rebellion of our youth and the rebelliousness of our culture in general while at the same time praising the rebellious origins of our country.  For me, as an American (and as a for-the-most-part politically conservative American!), to even say such things seems like the civic equivalent of blasphemy.  But I can't help but think of the words of Nathan to King David, that because of the murder he committed with the sword, the sword would never depart from his house.  Maybe in a similar way rebellion will never depart from us because of our origins in rebellion.  Lord have mercy on us.